"Orner-a legitimate triple-threat: novelist, short story master, and prolific essayist-returns with an addictive collection of more than 100 buoyant essays organized around a single day and a wide range of emotions. Evocative and erudite, this meditation on impermanence and its ephemeral joys is a gem." When his fragmented ruminations loop back to a powerful impression or image or favorite book, the effect is like turning over a prism in one’s hands, catching vivid flashes of light at each angle. Blending photographs, family lore, speculation, and literary musings, Orner’s nonlinear narrative weaves through elliptical reflections and faint memories from his 1970s childhood to the sorrows and delights of his adulthood. "Pushcart Prize–winning fiction writer Orner (Maggie Brown & Others) brings his lyrical, mosaic style to the story of his own life in this gorgeous and contemplative memoir. Still No Word from You is a book for anyone for whom reading is as essential as breathing.Ī Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year Orner’s solution is to start again from the beginning to slow the inevitable heartache. He stops reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring three quarters of the way through because he knows that finishing the novel will leave him bereft. In his mother’s copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, he’s stopped short by a single word in the margin, “YES!”-which leads him to conjure his mother at twenty-three. Covering such well-known writers as Lorraine Hansberry, Primo Levi, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as other greats like Maeve Brennan and James Alan McPherson, Orner’s highly personal take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss and love, hope and despair.
She seldom responded, leading him to plead in 1945, “Another day and still no word from you.” Seventy years later, Peter Orner writes in response to his grandfather’s plea: “Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone.”įrom the acclaimed fiction writer about whom Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, “You know from the second you pick him up that he’s the real deal,” comes Still No Word from You, a unique chain of essays and intimate stories that meld the lived life and the reading life. Stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, Seymour Orner wrote a letter every day to his wife, Lorraine. A new collection of pieces on literature and life by the author of Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism
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